• China has spent years modernizing and expanding its military.
• But China's military, like the US military on the eve of World War II, is missing a crucial kind of experience.

Before World War II, the US military wasn't much to look at. Even as the Roosevelt Administration began to prepare for the war, switching on the "arsenal of democracy" and instituting a peacetime draft, it wasn't enough to deter the Japanese from hitting the United States at Pearl Harbor.

When the Americans were battle-tested at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in 1943, they failed miserably.

China is facing a similar situation, with a large military slowly advancing in technology but lacking any real combat experience. But where will China face its Kasserine Pass?

Despite superior numbers and newer equipment, the Nazis handed the US their butts, and combat experience made the difference. The Nazis had been fighting in North Africa for almost three years by then and the Americans hadn't seen combat at all. The Americans were rigid and inflexible, while the Nazis already had time to work out all the kinks in their command and control.

At the time, it looked pretty bleak for us... but we all know Tunisia was just a warmup for what would come later.

The difference between Patton and the man he replaced was the same issue that troubled the Army as a whole. Where Patton's predecessor made rank as a teacher and trainer and had no real combat experience, Patton had been leading troops in combat since 1916.

For the Chinese, it's been some 40 years since the Peoples Liberation Army fought a major combat operation — and that did not go well.

In 1979, China invaded neighboring Vietnam, a country that had just finished fighting its own civil war four years prior. So when the Vietnamese had to respond to Chinese aggression, they had almost 40 years of fighting under their collective belt by that time.

Vietnam completely wiped the floor with the Chinese. China left Vietnam after just three weeks of fighting and has been largely inexperienced ever since.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army of today is very different from the one who invaded Vietnam. China now has its own homegrown fighter planes, ships, and intercontinental ballistic missiles, among other weapons systems, but while the tech has been tested, the Army itself has largely not been.

Meanwhile, the United States has experienced nearly uninterrupted combat opportunities in some form since Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and at least 18 years of constant warfare in Afghanistan. But that doesn't mean training doesn't have benefits.

Units who train in conditions as close to actual combat as possible fare better when it comes to real-world operations, but any training will help a unit gain experience in its battlefield roles. Once the United States maintained a regular standing army in the postwar world, it was better able to sustain battlefield losses and withdraw from a loss while inflicting heavy losses on the enemy. Research shows that a well-trained unit under experienced commander suffer far fewer casualties when the bullets start flying.

So while China would like the world to tremble at the idea of an advanced, well-trained army and navy exerting its influence and power at will, until the Chinese actually demonstrate the capability to use that training in a real-world combat situation, they'll always just be trying to push around their smaller neighbors while trying to ignore their real geopolitical rival — the one who's operating with airbases and seasoned combat troops on their doorstep.

Compiled by Olalekan Adeleye

Business Insider